Amidst the haggling and posturing of the third and last presidential debate last night, there was at least one issue both candidates happily agreed on - capital punishment.

Despite considerable evidence to the contrary, both Governor George W Bush and Vice-President Al Gore declared the death penalty was a deterrent and then moved on to other subjects. The issue died once more.

The nagging question of whether the US is executing innocent people on a regular basis was extensively examined earlier this year, after the Republican governor of Illinois, George Ryan, had a crisis of conscience and declared an embargo on lethal injections.

George W Bush, the Texas governor who has become the national leader in signing execution warrants (33 so far this year, 145 so far in his career), underwent particular scrutiny, as he is standing for an office where life and death decisions will presumably come thick and fast. It is fair to say that every press examination of the Texas record came to the conclusion that it was seriously flawed to say the least, even farcical.

But despite these reports, which pointed to the clear possibility that innocent people were being put death, the issue died. In the language spoken in Washington, it had "no traction", meaning it would not win or lose any votes. Vice President Al Gore also approved of the death penalty and would not be making it an issue.

However, that nagging sense that something is very wrong has refused to go away, and the press investigations have now been vindicated by a systematic analysis of the state's administration of capital punishment by the Texas Defender Service, an independent group of defence lawyers.

The title of the report is A State Of Denial, fittingly enough in view of the blithe assurances from Mr Bush and his aides that everything is being done according to the highest standards of justice.

The report found that the whole process was "a thoroughly flawed system" tainted by "racial bias, incompetent (defence) counsel, and misconduct committed by police officers and prosecutors". There are, the report said, "an intolerably high number of people being sentence to death and propelled through the appellate courts in a process that lacks the integrity to reliably identify the guilty or meaningfully distinguish those among them who deserve a sentence of death."

In other words, the system cannot reliably tell the difference between a guilty and an innocent defendant. This is partly due to the low quality of lawyers assigned to the defence by local courts. There are instances of lawyers nodding off in the courtroom, and one notorious case of a defence attourney vigorously snorting cocaine on the way to the trial.

These lawyers, paid pitiful fees, often do not bother with research. They simply try to get the case over with as quickly as possible and on to the next. Conniving with them are prosecutors and policemen who have frequently (84 times according to the report) withheld exculpatory evidence or given demonstrably false testimony.

Prosecutors also tend to pile on "junk science" to support their calls for punishment by lethal injection. One leading exponent of this kind of science is Dr James Grigson, a psychiatrist who regularly turns up in court to back prosecutorial claims that accused prisoners are beyond rehabilitation. He gives such evidence readily and regularly, usually without examining the prisoner in question. He last gave testimony in August, more or less exactly five years after being expelled from the American Psychiatric Association for misconduct.

Mr Bush's aides yesterday swatted away the allegations contained in the report like a troublesome, but not particularly threatening, insect. Ray Sullivan, a campaign spokesman, said: "In each case, defendants have full access to the courts of the appeal".

However, the report's analysis of over 100 cases at the appellate level found that the appeal judges held no hearing in 79% of them. They simply rubber-stamped the lower courts findings, and so on it went up the judicial chain until the path ends in the execution chamber.

According to one of the report's authors, Jim Marcus: "The big problem in Texas is that there is not really a stage in the system where we can be confident that these problems will be exposed and addressed. "

Ideally such life-and-death issues would be considered in the sort of national dialogue which accompanies a national election campaign. However, that has not happened. After a brief flurry of concern, the great majority of Americans are comfortable with the death penalty once more.